Born to Rule: the making and remaking of the British Elite

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• Prof Sam Friedman and Prof Aaron Reeves, London School of Economics
• Tuesday 25 February 2025, 12:30-14:00
• Sociology Department Seminar Room, Free School Lane.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact communications.

All welcome.

Think of the British elite and familiar caricatures spring to mind. But are today’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and political instincts? In this talk, based on our new book Born to Rule, we comb through a trove of data in search of an answer, looking at the profiles, interests, and careers of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today.

At the heart of the study is the historical database of Who’s Who, but we also mined genealogical records, combed through probate data, and interviewed over 200 leading figures from a wide range of backgrounds and professions to uncover who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want. What we found is that there is less movement at the top than we think. Yes, there has been some progress on including women and Black and Asian Brits, but those born into the top 1% are almost just as likely to get into the elite today as they were 125 years ago.

What has changed is how elites present themselves. Today’s elite pedal hard to convince us they are perfectly ordinary – in the way they tell their back story, express their cultural taste, or articulate their meritocratic legitimacy. And this is logical; we show that there is a strong symbolic market for ordinariness among the British public.

Why should we care? Because the elites we have affect the politics we get. We show that the family you are born into, and the schools you attend, leave a profound mark on the exercise of power.

This talk is part of the Dept of Sociology series.

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• Dept of Sociology
• Sociology Department Seminar Room, Free School Lane

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